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Submitted by Diligent on April 21, 2007
Category: Social Issues
Words: 1969 | Pages: 8
Views: 215
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In “Historical Perspectives: From Witch Hunts to PMS,” the chapter of her book “Unruly Women,” Karlene Faith (1993) dwelt upon the ‘images of women’ within historical paradigm from witch-hunts to PMS. The scholar based her analysis on the histories of white Anglo-Saxon women from England and Canada in the period between the 15th and the 19th centuries. E. Comack (1996), in the turn, reflected over popular myths on the painful issue of women’s victimization. The aforestated persistent themes in definitions of women’s deviance as well as the way the ‘myths about rape’ reflect historical images of women and/or blame the victim are analyzed in the current paper.
It seems that both the authors claimed that society in its historical developmental perspective was permeated with gender prejudices and masculine chauvinism in regard to women.
Faith (1993) argued that due to male dominance underlying historical and modern societal institutions, such as family, community, church, economic structures, legal and juridical establishments, women were segregated from mainstream culture on the factor of their gender.
The pillars of the Western Church, St. Paul and St. Augustine, associated sex with sin (Faith 41). Society was dominated by the concept of the male God, the male-dominated socio-economic hierarchies and power relations. The very definition ‘master’ or ‘lord,’ which designated the position on the top of a social structure, was conceptualized as meaning somebody of male gender. They founded their disbelief in women on the fact that the Bible described the first woman, Lilith, as malicious enchantress (this biblical theme was developed by Catholics and Protestants, e.g. Martin Luther who called all the women witches and enchantresses – discussed in Faith 14; Lilith was later portrayed by Rosetti 1855 and etc; Faith 13), and Eve as the seducer of an innocent male in the alliance with the Devil.
The two Dominican monks, Heinrich Kramer and...
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